Impressive swings and financially disastrous roundabouts in Electronic Arts’ year-end financial statement. The biggest news is the $1.08billion loss they’ve just posted. Yikes! However, accentuating the positive for a moment, revenues for the last financial year were actually 15% up compared to the previous 12 months. That’s thanks to massive sellers such as Skate 2, Spore, Need for Speed: Undercover, FIFA 09 and, of course, Rock Band, which apparently generated more cash for EA last year than any other single franchise. In fact there’s lots of good news where EA’s software portfolio is concerned. Here are a few highlights: - FIFA 09, Madden, NFL09 and Need for Speed: Undercover each sold over 5 million copies. It’s all very impressive, isn’t it? And that makes it all the more staggering that a company in such obviously vigorous health can still manage to widdle such massive amounts of wonga up the nearest wall. But you’ve got to speculate to accumulate, as they say, and fiscal actions based on that philosophy seem to lie at the root of the current financial position. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of EA slowing down in that regard either, with CEO John Riccitiello reporting: “EA’s strong cost actions in Q4 FY09 together with our investments in our digital service businesses will set us up for a stronger FY10.” “EA is well positioned with the right strategies in a growing industry.” Well, guess we’ll see about that over the next 12 months, eh?
- Spore sold 2 million copies. The current tally of user-created beasties on Sporepedia stands at more than 100 million.
- 14% of revenues came from Wii titles, 16% from PS3 and an impressive 24% from Xbox 360.
- EA plans to launch two new online subscription services in the coming year, that’s on top of the existing POGO and Warhammer Online businesses. The latter had 300,000 happy subscribers by March 09.
- EA will launch 30 new games for iPhone this year.
- In total 31 EA titles sold more than a million copies each, up from 27 that managed the same feat the previous year.